Author's Note:

My sixth Spideychelle one-shot since finishing Affinity War! This fic and those that will follow in the coming weeks are based off a list of prompts, posted on my Tumblr (forasecondtherewedwon).

34. "You might not like me, but you definitely want me."

Peter made the football team. Of course he did. The only thing Michelle figured the coach hadn't been sure about was which position Peter should be given. Where do you put the kid who can run suicide drills indefinitely, throw a ball with a perfect spiral the full length of the field, take a hit from a guy twice his size without moving an inch, and weave with more agility than any player the team has ever had? Michelle assumed the coach had worked that question out sometime between his days of drooling over the new recruit's hustle and his nights of championship dreams, visions of shiny gold trophies dancing in his head. The whole nine.

After years of honing her observation skills, Michelle was frustrated to find Peter Parker so unpredictable. When people quit marching band, usually it was to devote more time to the robotics lab or the chess club, not so they could shrug off the nerd mantle and become the overnight star of the football team. It was unprecedented.

She saw him a lot, almost as much as ever. Not on purpose; Michelle had always taken a certain quiet delight in perching on the bleachers and sketching the team's top-shelf assholes, so she was often around during practices. There was a niche, she felt, in pencil drawings of smack-talking bigots in homoerotic tussles.

Luckily―not that she had any kind of emotional investment in his moral status―Peter had never adopted his new bros' prejudices. But that didn't mean he hadn't changed. He took up more space. It wasn't a physical difference (he was too smart to go down the junk-shrivelling steroids route of some of the seniors, twitchy fingers crossed for a benevolent scout and a college scholarship), it was his ego. In that he'd apparently decided he had one. Quiet Peter Parker, marching band Peter Parker, Penis Parker, was newly known (by Michelle, who observed) to accomplish such spectacular feats as using his prodigy brain for guffaw-provoking comebacks in the cafeteria and―gasp―talking to girls.

Michelle couldn't confirm the plural, but she felt safe assuming it. For some reason, she wasn't very keen to catch him flirting or staring at a classmate's ass. The only girl she'd witnessed Peter communicating with was her. And she didn't say anything back.

When he approached her, she ignored him. Aggressively. His football cleats would come clicking up the bleachers during a water break and, because of her self-determined imperative to block him out, she'd look nowhere but at the sketchpad in her lap. Sometimes, it took ages before Peter would stop tormenting her with attempted small talk; her reference material (the players on the field) grew less fresh in her mind. In those moments, feeling his soft brown eyes on her and unable to meet them, Michelle found that she couldn't even fill her pages with flowers―a subject she'd always felt confident drawing from memory. Her pen or pencil would only trace meandering curlicues. Eventually, he'd go back to practice.

This new Peter didn't make sense to her, nor did the way her heart surged when he was close by. Until she got a feel for him from a distance, Michelle wasn't going to be any more inviting. It wasn't like they'd been friends before anyway.

As football season went on, with her wearing a raincoat to practices just in case the sky opened and she needed to shove her sketchpad inside, things became better between them. But that was Michelle's head talking. To a more sensitive part of herself, things were much worse.

He put himself in her way―maybe holding a door for her, maybe next in line at the water bottle refilling station when she turned around―but he wouldn't speak to her and she wouldn't look at him any higher than his chest. Michelle had a feeling Peter was doing it on purpose. Being so solidly present that she couldn't pretend not to see him, and then waiting for her to initiate a conversation. By the end of October, she almost did, but he walked away as her lips parted.

Michelle was tense. She couldn't sleep, although her bed was extra cozy now that she'd yanked her winter comforter out of the closet.

She didn't realize it was affecting Peter too, their… whatever it was, until she was back on the bleachers, sketching and freezing her ass off thanks to New York's first cold snap, and heard the coach yell his name. "Damn good catch, Parker," "That's it, that's it, Peter"―those were shouts Michelle had heard often enough, but this one wasn't praise. Her head snapped up. Peter was slouching to the sidelines, fingers hooked through the faceguard of his helmet as he let it slap against his thigh. He saw her looking down at him and she knew there was a moment coming that she couldn't escape.

Peter climbed the steps, eyes lowered, and Michelle made a quick sketch in her mind, noting the sweaty curls of his hair, the tension in his hands. It was a very windy day―the pages of her book rippling―and she could hardly breathe.

He reached her, putting on a confident stance.

"You might not like me," Peter announced, "but you definitely want me."

Her insides compressed in a sensation that felt like fury, but then Michelle considered what he'd said. Peter thought she didn't like him. Well, duh, of course she didn't. Except… She met his gaze and let it catch this time, let it hold. As wide as his eyes were, he hadn't given any of that space to arrogance; staring into them was a completely separate experience from hearing his voice. There was vulnerability in his face and nothing else.

Peter wasn't teasing her, though he'd nailed that brand of jock-type phrase. He desperately, Michelle saw, wanted her to want him. Want him, not the role he'd been learning since making the football team. She'd been uncharacteristically stupid, observing his failure to fit in with this group in a thousand details and not comprehending his loneliness.

Squinting one eye shut as the ubiquitous cloud cover slid momentarily clear of the sun, Michelle cut their locked gaze in half.

"I like you fine, Peter," she told him, open eye watering.

The next day, she was early to Biology and glanced up to see Peter stalled at the classroom's threshold, one of the football guys loudly but jokingly hassling him about quitting the team. Their eyes met as Peter turned away from his former teammate and headed to his seat. He smiled at her.

For the rest of the period, graphite lilies bloomed in Michelle's footnotes.